Is JJ Abrams America’s next great landscape painter? As I’ve noted previously, his new show Fringe introduces typography as a landscape element – merging rendered letters into a seamless filmic space to erase the notion of a picture plane. In these urban views the type floats lightly but is still firmly in the world of the show rather than belonging to the world of the viewer, us, like typical titles glued to the vertical plane of the screen. The titles, our armature of interpretation, share a horizon with the world we’re viewing. We’re sucked in.

The trailer for Abram’s new Star Trek movie opens with views of a high speed chase. Big sky, wide horizon, palpable nostalgia? It’s the American West! But… what is that ghost on the skyline?

Complete with period car, this is what it would have been like to approach Corbu’s Ville Radieuse should Houston have decided to buy into his scheme when Paris passed.

Source: Star Trek trailer

The culmination of these spectral views is our first glimpse at the iconic Enterprise. The central figure arrives at the den of these spectres and the end of the world – the end of his world, literally – on his motorcycle. Technology delivers technology. Like the viewer who cannot escape the typography of Fringe, world and text merged into one, this sequence of images presents a typical Abramsonian connundrum: technology will always fail you, but you will only have more technology to help. Nature is just a backdrop; it’s literally a landscape and nothing more.

The game is one of horizons: showing and hiding them. Like the opening sequence of LOST, the horizon is collaged with technological fragments into a scene of techno-sublime before quickly being eclipsed by more, messier technology. Amidst the chaos of the introductory crash scene, Jack and the other characters scramble to cannibalize the scraps of the plane itself into useful survival tools. Technology has already subsumed nature. It’s inescapable (mysterious smoke? hatches?) – all you can hope to do is break these monolithic technologies into more manageable fragments and use those chunks to piece the world back together into something knowable, a world with horizons again.

Source: Lostpedia

If you’re an American who lives overseas, chances are someone in your host country has quizzed you about the election. Sometimes it even seems like the rest of the world cares more about this election that the US does, which is more of a sad commentary on the US electorate than anything else.

Still, plenty of Americans do care about who we elect as president and make the effort to vote. Some of those people, like myself, happen to be living overseas at the moment and thus we’re left out of all the fun. No lines, no trip to the random community center you’ve never visited before, no levers: voting absentee is pretty civilized and wonderful, actually. The only snag is that you don’t get a sticker, and everyone knows that the primary reason to vote is because some old lady will give you a sticker!

So, if you live overseas, you voted in the US election, and you have a color printer you can now rectify this small oversight.

Click here to download an A4-sized sheet of stickers (it’s a 4mb PDF).

Arguably, plan thinking is seeping into the general culture as services like google maps and vehicular GPS become inescapable. What about section? Do you think about your elevation? You will as soon as sea levels start rising!

Every now and then I get an itch to work on a web project again. After being egged on by John and Tim to take a look at Yahoo Pipes I decided to take a look. Pipes provides a visual interface for building connections between web services like Flickr and Yahoo Maps with the open ended ethos of the unix pipe command.

The screenshot above is showing a graph of the elevation of my life over the past few months: the heights of the various places I’ve spent time in. To create that graph, data is pulled from two separate websites (dopplr and geonames.org), assembled by a third (bbcom), and drawn up nice and pretty by a fourth (Google’s mediocre viz API). This is exactly what I was talking about when I wrote about the infrastructural web last year. It’s glorious.

If you want to make your own graph you’ll need a Dopplr account with some trips in it and then take a visit to my site.

Above is a view of the Pipes interface. Look familiar?

Thanks to Dana for the name.

Recently, Jimmy Stamp pointed out that the new TV series Fringe lifts a Liebeskind and places it in a new city, but actually there’s more going on here. The copy of the same pilot that I watched was missing the exterior establishing shot but did make use of Liebeskind’s interior as the offices of ominous corporation Massive Dynamic:

In the second episode, visits to Massive Dynamic find the corporation in a slightly different home. One with more curves and a distinctive gradient fritting pattern on the windows:

Shown from the outside, Massive Dynamic’s HQ reverts to something much more banal but turns out in the third episode to be Seven World Trade.

Jimmy makes a good point that this approach belies a general laziness on the behalf of the production designers who use collage instead of actually designing something. Without the bigger budget of a feature film we can perhaps excuse the show for not designing their own buildings, but did they really expect a show designed for detail obsessed nerds to accept a building that is clearly orthogonal from the exterior and billowing when seen on the interior? Not even Massive Dynamic can pull of that sort of trick.
What I’ve been enjoying most about Fringe is another bit of trickery: the way that the location titles are integrated into the space of the scenes using camera tracking and environment mapping. By adding motion to an old technique these titles gain a new sort of augmented-reality authority. They’re not real… right?

This, too, is part of our new way of seeing the world.

Live action styrofoam sculpted by invisible wires, extreme sections, nonsense biomorphism, beton brut, and robotic greenery: this is the lush world of Peripetics, a 3 minute video piece produced by Zeitguised for the inaugural exhibition of the Zirkel Gallery in London.




The stills don’t do it justice: the film is remarkably engaging- an intricately Barney-esque, self-referential world where Vaseline has been replaced by shaders and deformers and the rules of this world are abandoned. The invisible is made visible and then rendered virtual though relentless applications of sectioning techniques.

These issues will be a recurring theme as advanced spatial conception seeps into our popular culture. With video games regularly asking players to turn up into down, solid into void and off-the-shelf rendering technology reaching a point of perfection, we are now sending fleets of astronauts into an unknown world beyond our own. Media addicts are seeing cutaways, three dimensional manipulation, data, and flocks of fluttering pixels inflate flatland with a new vitality that is not only aesthetic but structural. With hindsight, work like Peripetics may some day prove to be more than simply something pretty, it may prove be an early instrument that leads us to new worlds.

Ahem. Hello.

Having gone through the pain of migrating this blog to another CMS, I took the opportunity to dig way back into my own history of publishing stuff on the web. The post below was originally written on bryanboyer.com and has been replicated here as a reminder to myself that I’ve been doing this for some time now. 12 years!

OK. I have to make a confession. I’ve been keeping a secret. Of course, as secrets go on the internet this may or may not actually be a secret to you (and, now that I think of it, probably isn’t).

Right. In January I’m moving to Austin to co-found a startup with Ben and Lane.

So, you ask, what are we building? Well I really do wish I could tell you but that would ruin all of the fun. It’s going to be good and it’s going to have a matching cocktail to go along with it. Our company’s name will not include “.com”, “net”, “web”, “inter”, or “compu.” Those are bad words.

There, that’s it. Kind of anti-climactic wasn’t it?

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Less than one week till Soycon99 (tagline: “Die with Pie in 99″) otherwise known as Farmhouse2K otherwise known as ICon.

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Over and Out.